Gestures are the actions produced with the movements of the arm, hand, and facial expressions. Infants use gestures to communicate in the first year of their life before beginning to talk ( Bates, (1976) ). 1, 2. Pointing is one of the commonly used deictic gestures for communication3 and considered as a rudimentary level of the early language development (Cochet &Vauclair, 2010; Colonnesi, Stams, Koster, & Noom, 2010; O¨ zc¸alıs¸kan & Goldin-Meadow, 2005). Pointing is the extension of the arm and index finger towards a target. It usually emerges in infants at around 12-14 months4, 5, 6 and/or 11 to 12 months6, 7, 8,9,10. Infants point to inform others, share Interest and to obtain information ( Southgate, Maanen, & Csibra,2007) . Infants …show more content…
Cochet and Vauclair 10 reported that imperative gestures were linked with whole-hand pointing, whereas declarative gestures were characterized by an extended index finger. Furthermore, declarative gestures were more frequently supplemented by vocalizations than imperative gestures. Recently, it is believed that gesture and language are considered as “close family”12 and intrinsically linked8. It is suggested that gestures provide children with a tool to expand their communicative repertoire as well as to convey increasingly complex ideas 13,14. The early gestures, specifically the pointing gestures, that children produce could replicate their potential for learning specific aspects of language, on which advanced linguistic abilities can be constructed13,14. Gestures vary differently in different cultures. Italian is a rich gestural culture when compared with Americans15; 16. However, gestural usage is not appreciated in the Indian community. It is the phenomenon of avoidance and suppression of gestures during speech17. Therefore, the present study aimed at exploring the emergence of pointing gestures and their relation to spoken word development in the Indian context. The objectives of the study were to analyze the emergence of pointing gesture alone, pointing with vocalization, pointing with verbalization and pointing with word